Square believes that user experience is at the core of mass adoption for cryptocurrency, and they’ve made an eloquent job posting in that pursuit.
Designers: Jack Dorsey’s Square Wants You
A project of Jack Dorsey, Square instituted Bitcoin support sometime back. The company hopes to onboard people in the same way as Coinbase, with a focus on creating use cases.
“Unlike traditional design roles at cryptocurrency companies, this is a chance to focus on establishing the long term design vision of Bitcoin. You will work within the Square Crypto team and engage the broader open source developer community in order to make tangible forward progress toward this vision.”
Square is far from alone in the belief that user experience is a foremost concern. An entire protocol – FIO – has been designed to make wallets more usable and interoperable.
The idea is that anyone should be able to use crypto, and then more people will be interested in so doing.
Just because something is easy, however, doesn’t mean you should expect the masses to start using it right away.
Regulators have been louder lately, expressing concern that cryptocurrencies are primarily the realm of criminals.
There’s little evidence for this.
Crypto Steps Out Of The Shadows
If one group is most responsible for crypto usage and adoption, it’s probably traders and speculators, not criminals.
The need for a dedicated blog post with a lengthy job description by Square outlines the rarity of actual blockchain developers.
It’s a rare time for human talent – there’s far more demand than supply.
Quality blockchain developers are mostly employed along philosophical lines, or independent. Hiring sprees yield people with little or no experience in working, as notable developers can’t be lured based on pay packages alone.
Facebook has been slowly hiring as many people from the crypto world as it can get its hands on. If all of Silicon Valley – led by Square – rushes into crypto, then the blockchain talent pool will necessarily have to expand.
All of which might slow growth and subsequent adoption of bitcoin and crypto. The circle of life, as it were, for the bitcoin and wider blockchain industry.
In the long-run, when we look back and judge whether major companies had a good or bad impact on crypto, job creation will be just one aspect we look at.
Other deciding factors might include how much user adoption we saw as a result of their efforts. Would the same people who fill those jobs be more useful at other firms, growing the crypto economy?